Re:US FAA says it will phase out floppy disks from air traff...
by pembrook on Friday November 06, 2026 @07:45PM
(#50400487)
My grandpa used to be a manual typesetter in the newspaper industry and retired in the 80s.
Then he came back to work also a few decades later, part time, when desktop publishing was all the rage. Welp, of course the computers went down.
So they fired up the old hot metal typesetting machines and he manually set all 100,000 words of that Newspaper by hand, and then they went to print using 19th century steam powered print lines.
Except, that story is total bullshit that I made up. Because "the computer went down" is something we can mitigate much easier typesetting everything by hand.
Sometimes the old technology actually is objectively worse, inefficient, and obsolete. Like floppy disks, or manually having humans close the books at a bank.
Then he came back to work also a few decades later, part time, when desktop publishing was all the rage. Welp, of course the computers went down.
So they fired up the old hot metal typesetting machines and he manually set all 100,000 words of that Newspaper by hand, and then they went to print using 19th century steam powered print lines.
Except, that story is total bullshit that I made up. Because "the computer went down" is something we can mitigate much easier typesetting everything by hand.
Sometimes the old technology actually is objectively worse, inefficient, and obsolete. Like floppy disks, or manually having humans close the books at a bank.